I’m just looking through my list of possible enhancements for TWOTA and one was to add a search feature to the site. This is certainly possible, but I wonder if it’s really worth it. We already have the related articles, pictures, etc at the bottom of each encyclopaedia entry. So long as everything is linked together well (as it should be), it seems to me that looking up the particular aspect of the Panzer world in the encyclopedia would produce better results than a search engine anyway.

So, is a search engine really needed (especially given that this might be quite a lot of work to implement)?

I wonder if search would have been useful if that script was properly organised under “Resources” (with the other scripts).

legaiaflame:

Although, someone might overlook the Encyclopedia section since it’s not on the left panel. Maybe you could also include the Encyclopedia section as a link along with the Explore the Games section?

Has this been an issue in practice? The reason why the encyclopaedia is not in the “Browse by Media Type” section is because it’s part of the top navigation. Placing it in the left bar would be duplicating the link. One aim of TWOTA4 was to reduce the amount of clutter in the lefthand navigation.

It looks like DuckDuckGo doesn’t provide an API to embedding their search results into another website. However, as a simpler solution we could add a search box to TWOTA which displays the results as a regular DuckDuckGo page when the search button is clicked. That would be easiest solution to implement I think, but it has the downside of taking you out of TWOTA temporarily.

One advantage of using an existing search engine is that DuckDuckGo have a lot more resources to put into making the search capabilities accurate. Whereas, I’m just one guy writing a search engine in his spare time. I’d say using an existing service is different, rather than improper.

I’ve added a search feature. It uses DuckDuckGo and I really think this is better than anything that I could create in a reasonable amount of time (or at all, given the complexities of writing good search algorithms). It looks like there are options for customising the results page, but I haven’t spent much time looking into that. In any case, I hope it proves useful.